|
De Turkse schrijver Orhan Pamuk werd geboren op 7 juni 1952 in Istanbul. Zie
ook alle tags voor
Orhan Pamuk op dit blog.
Uit: Istanbul. Memories and the
City (Vertaald door Maureen Freely)
Here we come to the
heart of the matter: I've never left Istanbul - never left the houses, streets
and neighbourhoods of my childhood. Although I've lived in other districts from
time to time, fifty years on I find myself back in the Pamuk Apartments, where
my first photographs were taken and where my mother first held me in her arms
to show me the world. I know this persistence owes something to my imaginary
friend, and to the solace I took from the bond between us. But we live in an
age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants, and so I am sometimes
hard-pressed to explain why I've stayed not only in the same place, but the
same building. My mother's sorrowful voice comes back to me, 'Why don't you go
outside for a while, why don't you try a change of scene, do some travelling
...?'
Conrad, Nabokov,
Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between
languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations
were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through
rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same
street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate:
I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.
Flaubert, who visited
Istanbul a hundred and two years before my birth, was struck by the variety of
life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a
century's time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true:
after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul
existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated
than it had ever been its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been
a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either
battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own.
At least once in a
lifetime, self-reflection leads us to examine the circumstances of our birth.
Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular
date? These families into which we were born, these countries and cities to
which the lottery of life has assigned us - they expect love from us, and in
the end, we do love them, from the bottom of our hearts - but did we perhaps
deserve better?
Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul, 7 juni 1952)
De Duitse schrijfster Monika Mann werd als vierde kind van Thomas Mann geboren op
7 juni 1910 in München. Zie ook alle tags voor Monika
Mann op dit blog.
Uit: Das fahrende Haus
Wer oder was war
schuld? War dem Weißen Haus zu Ohren gekommen, daß ich gerne Tolstoi las und
die Musik von Mussorgskij liebte? Waren es «linkselende», «peacemongerische»,
das heißt pazifistische Verwandte, war mein Plan, eine Reise nach Mexiko zu
tun, war es die allgemeine Vorsicht der Regierung, die meine Fragen und
Forschungen, unterstützt von einem in solchen Dingen gewiegten Rechtsanwalt,
nichts fruchten ließ? (Es stand ja alles und manches andere mehr in jenem
Aktenstoß.) Ich saß da also immer noch mit meinem (nunmehr ganz «anrüchigen»)
Ungarpaß.
Das ungarische Konsulat
in New York war ausgezogen, umgezogen, stand überhaupt nicht im Telephonbuch.
Man mußte wissen, daß es durch die Hintertüre einer britischen
Institution
im finstersten Downtown
zu betreten war. War ich auch wohl ein wenig abgebrüht, so wurden doch Ohnmacht
und Lachkitzel von damals jetzt zur regelrechten Furcht. Ich fühlte mich fehl
am Platz, und ich
fürchtete mich. Obgleich mein Mann Ungar gewesen war, habe ich nie ein
besonderes Verhältnis zu seiner Heimat gehabt. Ihre Pferdesteppen, ihr buntes,
kultiviertes Bu-
dapest, ihre Rhapsodien
ich kannte es aus der Ferne. Doch das, was mir immer an jenem Volk gefiel,
war seine Weltaufgeschlossenheit, sein vielinteressiertes, kosmopolitisches
Wesen.
Mein Mann war in den
verschiedensten Sprachen und Kulturen zu Hause, und er war keine Ausnahme.
Diese Herren hier sie waren klein und geheimnisvoll sprache überhaupt nur
ungarisch. Sie flüsterten hinter staubigen Barrieren mit Seitenblicken nach
meiner Person, sie verschwanden und kamen wieder kopfschüttelnd, mit
finster-listigem Grinsen, so schien mir, Namen aussprechend wie Rákosi und
Búdapesti. Sie bedeuteten mir mit unheimlichem Händereiben in ihrer Sprache der
Mai- käfer, wiederzukommen, ein andermal vielleicht . . .
Monika Mann (7 juni 1910 17 maart 1992)
Hier op Capri met vriend Antonio Spadaro in de jaren 1970
De Amerikaanse dichteres en schrijfster Nikki Giovanni
werd geboren op 7 juni 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Zie ook alle tags voor Nikki
Giovanni op dit blog.
Rain
rain is
god's sperm falling
in the receptive
woman how else
to spend
a rainy day
other than with you
seeking sun and stars
and heavenly bodies
how else to spend
a rainy day
other than with you
Cotton Candy On A Rainy Day
Don't look now
I'm fading away
Into the gray of my mornings
Or the blues of every night
Is it that my nails
keep breaking
Or maybe the corn
on my secind little piggy
Things keep popping out
on my face or of my life
It seems no matter how
I try I become more difficult
to hold
I am not an easy woman
to want
They have asked
the psychiatrists . . . psychologists . . .
politicians and social workers
What this decade will be
known for
There is no doubt . . . it is
loneliness
Nikki Giovanni
(Knoxville, 7 juni 1943)
De Amerikaanse schrijver Harry Crews werd geboren
op 7 juni 1935 in Bacon County, Georgia. Zie ook alle tags voor Harry
Crews op dit blog.
Uit: Harry Crews On Writing
I decided a long
time agovery long time agothat getting up at four oclock to start work works
best for me. I like that. Some people dont like to get up in the morning. I
like to get up in the morning. And theres no place to go at four oclock in
the morning, and nobodys gonna call you, and you cant call anybody. Back when
I was a drunk, at least in this little town, theres no place to go buy
anything to drink. So it was just me and the writing board.
So, I write until
eight or eight-thirty, then I go over to the gym and work out on the weights
for a couple hours, then I go to the karate dojo and, as a rule, spar with a
guy who consistently whups my ass. Its point karatewere not going full
force, we dont wear pads on out feet and hands, buteven thenwhen youre just
touching a guy, and you think a guys gonna move one way and you kick, and he
doesnt move that way, he moves the other way, he moves right into your kick,
you can get hurt. Well, not hurt bad, as a rule. Maybe bloody a nose or something
like that. But you can end up
pretty sore.
Then I come home,
eat a light lunch, then just go straight back to the thing. I might work till
three oclock . . . there comes a time of diminishing returns. Youre just
jerking yourself off thinking youre doing some good work, then you go back to
it the next day and you think, Oh, my God, and you have to throw away two or
three pages. But the way I do itI dont believe Ive ever heard of anyone
doin it quite this way.
Harry Crews (7 juni 1935 28 maart 2012)
De Amerikaanse schrijfster Louise Erdrich werd
geboren op 7 juni 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota. Zie ook alle tags voor Louise
Erdrich op dit blog.
Uit: The Round House
I was reading and
drinking a glass of cool water in the kitchen when my father came out of his
nap and entered, disoriented and yawning. For all its importance Cohens Handbook was not a heavy book and
when he appeared I drew it quickly onto my lap, under the table. My father
licked his dry lips and cast about, searching for the smell of food perhaps,
the sound of pots or the clinking of glasses, or footsteps. What he said then
surprised me, although on the face of it his words seem slight.
Where is your mother?
His voice was hoarse
and dry. I slid the book on to another chair, rose, and handed him my glass of
water. He gulped it down. He didnt say those words again, but the two of us
stared at each other in a way that struck me somehow as adult, as though he
knew that by reading his law book I had inserted myself into his world. His
look persisted until I dropped my eyes. I had actually just turned thirteen.
Two weeks ago, Id been twelve.
At work? I said, to
break his gaze. I had assumed that he knew where she was, that hed got the
information when he phoned. I knew she was not really at work. She had answered
a telephone call and then told me that she was going in to her office to pick
up a folder or two. A tribal enrollment specialist, she was probably mulling
over some petition shed been handed. She was the head of a department of one.
It was a Sundaythus the hush. The Sunday afternoon suspension. Even if shed
gone to her sister Clemences house to visit afterward, Mom would have returned
by now to start dinner. We both knew that. Women dont realize how much store
men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings
into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs, and
as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us
ticking away on the evening. And so, you see, her absence stopped time.
Louise Erdrich
(Little Falls, 7 juni 1954)
De Duitstalige dichteres Mascha Kaléko (eig. Golda Malka Aufen) werd geboren op 7
juni 1907 in Krenau of Schidlow in Galicië in het toenmalige
Oostenrijk-Hongarije, nu Polen. Zie ook alle tags voor
Mascha Kaléko op dit blog.
»Take it easy!«
Tehk it ih-sie, sagen
sie dir.
Noch dazu auf englisch.
»Nimms auf die leichte
Schulter!«
Doch, du hast zwei.
Nimms auf die leichte.
Ich folgte diesem
populären
Humanitären Imperativ.
Und wurde schief.
Weil es die andre
Schulter
Auch noch gibt.
Man muß sich also leider
doch bequemen,
Es manchmal auf die
schwere zu nehmen.
Mascha Kaléko (7 juni 1907 21 januari 1975)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 7e juni ook mijn
blog van 7 juni 2011 deel 2.
|
